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The Politics of Pageantry: York U. Award-Winning Historian Viv Nelles Interprets the Act of Commemoration on the Eve of Canada Day
Nelles, who has just won the prestigious Sir John A. Macdonald Prize for the best book in Canadian history for The Art of Nation Building: Pageantry and Spectacle at Quebec's Tercentenary (University of Toronto Press, 1999), shows us what it is that Canadians do when they commemorate the past. In beautifully illustrated pages, he retraces the coming together of the many, often conflicting views of Canadian nationhood at the beginning of "Canada's Century" that persist in our time.
In awarding the prize, the Canadian Historical Association cites the book as "a valuable contribution to the international literature on the construction of memory. H.V. Nelles attacks the exceptionally complex subject of Canadian identity in the Edwardian Age....The result is a rigorous and multi-dimensional analysis of the struggle to reach consensus on a Canadian national image."
Nelles writes that much of what we as Canadians would become and could not become in the 20th century was on display in the streets and on the pageant grounds of Quebec in 1908. "While watching this year's Canada Day celebrations, we should know that pageantry and spectacle are not just ephemeral entertainment, but politics by other means," says Nelles, an unprecedented two-time winner of the Sir John A. Macdonald Prize. "Celebrating Canada is a political procedure; as political as a speech at a convention."
Nelles reveals the Quebec tercentenary celebrations as an attempt to interpret history before a mass audience in support of a particular vision of what Canada should be and might become. The climax of the two weeks of festivities was an historical pageant in which 4,000 sumptuously costumed citizens re-enacted classic events in Canada's history. The pivotal event -- the battle for Canada on the Plains of Abraham -- is replayed as a ėGrande Parade d'honneur' where the two great armies of 1759 appear opposite each other in full ceremonial dress. While gunships in the harbour simulate a bombardment of the city, generals Wolfe and Montcalm exchange honours before marching their troops together across the plain to the strains of ėGod Save the Queen' and ėO Canada.' Nelles says the festival was full of similar adjustments of the past to suit the present.
Nelles presents the event of the tercentenary from many perspectives -- from those who came to watch and those who took part -- and sheds much light on the politics of memory, the theatrics of history, and ultimately, the willingness of Canadians "to avoid tough choices and live with contradictions."
Culling from the private diaries, letters and memorabilia of leading social and political figures attending the tercentenary, Nelles restores to public memory an event of a national celebration of Canada unmatched until the centennial of 1967. He begins his historical journey with the discovery of the private memorabilia of the young Clare Denison of Toronto who had accompanied her parents to the spectacle.
"Her scrapbook and souvenirs challenged me to write this book in part because they reminded me of something I had been avoiding. Here I could see an earlier group of Canadians inside and outside of Quebec reaching out towards one another, trying within the vocabulary of their time and in both languages to find some kind of mutual accommodation but not knowing quite how to go about it," writes Nelles. He confesses that too many historians of his generation have defined Quebec out of the picture of Canadian history and historians in Quebec have done the same with the rest of Canada. Nelles took up the subject of the 1908 tercentenary during a national crisis in Canada that culminated in the last Quebec referendum, mindful of how history is used in the shaping of nations and how history sometimes gets in the way of nation-building. " (It) seemed to be a subject worth exploring, not just for its own sake, but also for what illumination it might shed on the central unsolved problem of our time."
Nelles teaches history at York University, where he specializes in the study of Canadian political economy and public memory. In addition to The Art of Nation Building, he has authored or co-authored: The Philosophy of Railroads (1972); The Politics of Development (1974); The Revenge of the Methodist Bicycle Company (1977); Monopoly's Moment: The Organization and Regulation of Canadian Utilities, 1800-1930; Southern Exposure: Canadian Promoters in Latin America and the Caribbean, 1896-1930. In 1976-77, Nelles was the first Professor of Canadian Studies in Japan, where he taught at Keio University, the University of Tsukuba, and International Christian University in Tokyo. In 1981-82, he was William Lyon Mackenzie King Professor at Harvard University. In 1983 he lectured on a Shastri Fellowship in India.
From 1988 to 1992, he chaired the Ontario Council on University Affairs, presiding over a revision of the funding formula for universities and several major policy reviews. He has just returned from two terms at Cambridge University where he has been elected an overseas Fellow of Churchill College. As a visiting fellow of the British Academy in the spring of 2000 he lectured at Oxford, Edinburgh, London, the University of Wales at Bangor, University College, Dublin, and was keynote speaker at the British Association of Canadian Studies Conference at Edinburgh. He is currently collaborating on a research project on an environmental history of the Bow River in Alberta, and directing a small team of researchers studying earthquakes in 19th century Ontario.
For further information, please contact:
Prof. H.V. Nelles
Susan Bigelow
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